Inadvertent Spamming to Virgin Media Clients, the ISP Apologizes

The globally renowned Internet Service Provider (ISP), Virgin Media situated in UK, of late, expressed regrets and apology after committing a huge mistake, which led to its clients getting blasted with massive bulk e-mails, published theregister.co.uk dated April 17, 2014.

Apparently, Virgin Media aimed at apprising clients regarding a few changes they needed to make in the manner of signing in for accessing Google through the e-mail id virgin.net of Virgin Media.

But, the mailing list utilized for sending messages was wrongly configured, therefore when end-users hit on "reply all" while answering the e-mails, their e-mails got dispatched to all the persons whose ids appeared on that mailing list. Subsequently, when recipients of those replied e-mails answered, it resulted in numerous spam mails ending up inside their inboxes.

Representatives of Virgin Media said that some of the ISP's clients got an e-mail that seemingly a supplier of the ISP sent. In case they hit on the 'reply-all' button, the message got delivered to more people. While Virgin Media was investigating the incident, it suggested users not to answer the message in question. The ISP, meanwhile, expressed apology for the problem that consequently took place, the officials added. Softpedia.com published this dated April 17, 2014.

The officials further added that the problem would occur with only those clients who were presently utilizing a virgin.net id.

Virgin Media, without revealing the total number of current as well as erstwhile customers who were impacted, stated that there were presently 135,000 such clients, a few of whom reported getting as many as 250 e-mails.

Anti-virus specialist Graham Cluley posted online that fortunately, nobody seemed as abusing Virgin Media's improperly configured mailing list via dispatching one malicious web-link or a phishing e-mail. Grahamcluley.com published this dated April 17, 2014.

Meanwhile, according to Cluley, users who got trapped inside the spam deluge had their e-mail ids exposed widely thus becoming vulnerable to future spam pretending to be say, Virgin.

He concluded that anyone executing an address list required working extremely carefully in framing it in order that he avoided a case like that of Virgin Media.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/28/2014